Have you sign-up for weekly asymptomatic testing at APS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t sign up for that. There are people who seem to want Covid to go on forever.

It’s empowering to them.

It is an endemic disease that is never going away. Why is it so hard for you to understand?

Surveillance testing keeps kids out of school and essentially closes schools to healthy kids. Test to stay keeps kids in school. It's not that hard to understand the difference.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Covid has killed nearly twice as many kids in the past year as the flu has in any year over the past twenty, and has killed nearly 10x as many kids as the flu has in some of the last 20 years. So you can try to wave your hands around it with your “oh it’s less deadly to HEALTHY children” tap dancing but the simple truth is that you are wrong and that dicking around over precautions and safety caused Covid child mortality numbers to shoot up in the last six months and your old flu comparative isn’t applicable anymore. Nice job you.

So on one hand you say our numbers in nova are low compared to the south where folks aren’t wearing masks or getting vaxxed and in another post you (you appear to be the same poster) are saying that soon kids shouldn’t have to wear masks at school anymore and btw masks don’t even work. So excuse my confusion over what your endgame is here when it seems like if government officials would just go along you would be anti-test and anti mask in schools (because I guess spread shouldn’t matter if adults are vaxxed). That’s not what the CDC is saying, but go off, my dude.

The flu comparison is still more than applicable. Kids with significant comorobidities are at risk of COVID. You have the UK, where there are no masks in school and their health commission didn't recommend vaccinating kids under 16 because the risk to kids is so low. May COVID works differently in Europe than in the US?

The South's rates are high because they're not vaccinated, not because they're not masking. Compare Northern Virginia (no mask mandate) to DC and Montgomery County (mask mandates). Any statistically significant case difference?

You can't use these measures as strict comparisons. Regardless of mask mandates, most people I see out and about in stores and public places like church are still wearing masks. This seems to be a more voluntary people than in other places that need mandates to get them to wear masks.

Sounds like you're saying mask mandates aren't needed. I completely agree. If people want to mask voluntarily, be my guest.

No. I agree with masking and since enough kids won't do it without mandates, I agree with the APS mandate. Children with their parents in public places behave differently than children without their parents around; so while they may be "voluntarily" masking in certain public arenas because their parents are making sure of it, that doesn't mean they will voluntarily mask in school. I also believe every teacher and school employee who can, should be required to be vaccinated.

What I am saying is there are always other little influences and factors precluding a strict apples to apples comparison. That's why SCIENCE looks at the WHY behind things.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t sign up for that. There are people who seem to want Covid to go on forever.

It’s empowering to them.

It is an endemic disease that is never going away. Why is it so hard for you to understand?

Surveillance testing keeps kids out of school and essentially closes schools to healthy kids. Test to stay keeps kids in school. It's not that hard to understand the difference.

Exactly, I don't think that there are many people out there who are anti-testing. They are anti-needless quarantines. A test-to-stay approach increases testing and KEEPS KIDS IN SCHOOL.

[Anonymous]

Remember when over the summer these same anti-masking and anti-testing people were saying that they didn't believe schools would be open, that Duran would find some safety rationale to close them, and that the safety people would never be satisfied until schools were closed again?

And now here we are with all APS schools open, and these same people are still complaining about the safety people. Could their kid have covid? Yes! But if they are asymptomatic they don't care if their kid goes to school and infects other kids, because that's just how epidemics work and we all need to get on with our lives! They don't care about the ramifications of this -- that significant covid spread in one school actually could close that school and then everyone gets hurt! It all comes down to their unwillingness to be inconvenienced. The horror!

Hey -- APS has said that if you regret your decision to sign up your kid for asymptomatic testing, you can revoke it. So sign up your kid. If they get tested and are made to stay at home when in fact they don't have covid, deal with that for a week, and then REVOKE YOUR PERMISSION. No big deal. Try it first and see if the terrible result you have imagined in your head is really going to happen. What's that? You can't be bothered with the risk of this happening to you? Got it.

[Anonymous]

I too am not signing up for the random testing with poorly thought out implications and no clarity on the algorithms.

We are all fully vaccex, test where required, mask indoors and are careful. I have tests at home and will test my kids if they have symptoms of anything and will keep them at home if they are ill - like i did pre covid.

I see no point in asymptomatic testing. Asymptomatic carriers transmission risk is very low and when masked (as my kids are in school with K95 masks) its even less.

I wish there was a vaccine mandate for all adults in the school system. That is a much more likely source of infection as all the studies prove.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Remember when over the summer these same anti-masking and anti-testing people were saying that they didn't believe schools would be open, that Duran would find some safety rationale to close them, and that the safety people would never be satisfied until schools were closed again?

And now here we are with all APS schools open, and these same people are still complaining about the safety people. Could their kid have covid? Yes! But if they are asymptomatic they don't care if their kid goes to school and infects other kids, because that's just how epidemics work and we all need to get on with our lives! They don't care about the ramifications of this -- that significant covid spread in one school actually could close that school and then everyone gets hurt! It all comes down to their unwillingness to be inconvenienced. The horror!

Hey -- APS has said that if you regret your decision to sign up your kid for asymptomatic testing, you can revoke it. So sign up your kid. If they get tested and are made to stay at home when in fact they don't have covid, deal with that for a week, and then REVOKE YOUR PERMISSION. No big deal. Try it first and see if the terrible result you have imagined in your head is really going to happen. What's that? You can't be bothered with the risk of this happening to you? Got it.

How about before you insist families sign up for this, provide some proof that there is any real tangible benefit to this program? I think it’s reasonable to ask whether this is a good use of time/resources. And the answer is really that it’s not. It’s just theater. I support masking in schools, outdoor lunch, PCR testing if ill, etc. But surveillance testing in schools has not been proven effective. You act as if this testing will prevent “significant COVID spread,” but in actuality, “even during a time of high community spread — about 40,000 tests among asymptomatic individuals would need to be performed to prevent one in-school transmission.” Not to mention there is a 1-2% false positive rate so that increases the detriment of kids missing school unnecessarily. Not to mention the kids in the same testing pool as the false positive.

The juice is not worth the squeeze here. Find other ways to mitigate COVID b/c this ain’t it.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/19/schools-covid-testing-cost/

[Anonymous]

Also to emphasize a real life example from that article: “One private school in San Francisco with which we worked, and which gave us permission to share its experience — anonymously — has been open since October and has been testing all students and staff members monthly with saliva-based PCR tests; the school had performed more than 1,600 surveillance tests as of March 31. Only 10 came back positive, and eight were determined by clinical review and further testing to be false positives. Of the two true positive tests, one person had mild symptoms and another had a known exposure. In other words, the testing program did not identify any cases among teachers or students that would not have been picked up through ordinary symptom-based and contact-based screening.”

So show me where this surveillance testing has actually been proven effective in schools? Explain to me beyond the vagaries of that it “might prevent” spread why this is a good use of taxpayer funds, loss of learning time, etc?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also to emphasize a real life example from that article: “One private school in San Francisco with which we worked, and which gave us permission to share its experience — anonymously — has been open since October and has been testing all students and staff members monthly with saliva-based PCR tests; the school had performed more than 1,600 surveillance tests as of March 31. Only 10 came back positive, and eight were determined by clinical review and further testing to be false positives. Of the two true positive tests, one person had mild symptoms and another had a known exposure. In other words, the testing program did not identify any cases among teachers or students that would not have been picked up through ordinary symptom-based and contact-based screening.”

So show me where this surveillance testing has actually been proven effective in schools? Explain to me beyond the vagaries of that it “might prevent” spread why this is a good use of taxpayer funds, loss of learning time, etc?

Okay. How about this recent (8/1/2021) Lancet study on the cost savings achieved last year in at 93 K-12 schools and 18 universities throughout the country through a similar pooled surveillance program?

Surveillance testing was a factor in the early detection of asymptomatic infection and minimization of an outbreak risk. According to our data, a 0.3% positivity rate was observed after testing 253,406 samples. This amounts to 855 individuals identified early before a significant outbreak was observed. Although it would be difficult to estimate cost averted due to variability of positivity rate among asymptomatic populations, we estimated that these 855 individuals could potentially spread infection to 2.4 persons per day in a school setting [[22]]. In the absence of an early detection strategy (surveillance), this would lead to 2052 infected persons due to asymptomatic transmission. Out of these 2052 individuals, up to 25% (or 513 persons) may be symptomatic [[23]]. These persons would have required out-patient management at minimum, costing an average of $500–1000 for out-patient care, according to data released by Blue Cross Blue Shield [[24]]. Therefore, the costs averted for mild to moderate cases can be conservatively estimated to be between $256,500 and 513,000.

Furthermore, nearly 5% of symptomatic individuals (under 20 years old) have presented with severe to critical disease [[25],[26]], Thus nearly 26 individuals would have required hospitalization according to a FAIR Health Study, with the median cost of hospitalization ranging from a low of $34,662 for the 23–30 age group to a high of $45,683 for the 51–60 age group [[24]]. For those under 20 years of age, the average hospitalization cost was estimated at $68,261 and $77,323 for those over 60 years of age. Therefore, the cost averted for severe to critical cases was conservatively estimated to be $901,212 for our test population. These were the most conservative estimates of the cost averted by combining frequent surveillance testing (weekly) with prompt isolation/quarantine procedures in school and university setting. These estimates did not consider the worst-case scenario, where infection to older individuals within the school (teachers, principal) and outside of the school setting (parents, grandparents) would most likely have led to worse clinical outcome due to COVID-19.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00308-4/fulltext. The most conservative estimates to this study suggest that it ultimately prevented around 2052 additional people from becoming infected with Covid, and that this prevention saved well over $1million in medical costs, which may be a drastic underestimation as it does not consider potential effects from older individuals at the school or home (principals or grandparents) becoming infected and having worse clinical outcomes than those allowed for here. This cost analysis further makes no valuation of the monetary value of the continued health impairment caused caused by some Covid cases or the monetary value of the lives of any of the (again, conservatively estimated) 2,052 additional people who would have caught Covid from the 855 individuals identified early through this testing program. (But hey, to the anti-testers, that kind of preventable death is just what happens during an epidemic.)

The study appears to have been subsidized by a funding group so the cost of the testing itself is not given; however it is noted that it's the POOLING of the test results -- the thing that most parents who won't sign their kids up for it -- that makes the testing cheaper and cost effective to perform in bulk. In other words, the people who won't sign up their kids don't really want testing and will only sign up for it if it's the very expensive kind that will break the budget. Because again, they don't care about APS as a whole -- everything comes down to their own individual convenience. No surprise there.

[Anonymous]

In other words, the people who won't sign up their kids don't really want testing and will only sign up for it if it's the very expensive kind that will break the budget. Because again, they don't care about APS as a whole -- everything comes down to their own individual convenience. No surprise there.

This is such a crock. Making sure our kids stay in school is not about "convenience". It is about making up for 1.5 years of garbage, non-existent education. These kids NEED to be in school and not suffering periodic quarantine disruptions. I wouldn't care if my kid were sent home for a few weeks if they were getting real-time, live virtual schooling in the interim. But that isn't what is in the works - kids will have "asynchronous" assignments. The kids have done enough to quell the spread. The quarantining of close contacts of asymptomatic people is not-evidence based.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t sign up for that. There are people who seem to want Covid to go on forever.

It’s empowering to them.

It is an endemic disease that is never going away. Why is it so hard for you to understand?

Surveillance testing keeps kids out of school and essentially closes schools to healthy kids. Test to stay keeps kids in school. It's not that hard to understand the difference.

If, as you say,it's never going away, will test to stay become permanent?

[Anonymous]

Vaccines for < 12 available before year's end, it seems. That's when it ends, folks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Vaccines for < 12 available before year's end, it seems. That's when it ends, folks.

Not unless it covers 0-5 years. Everyone said it would end when adults (most high risk) would be vaccinated. More kids are getting COVID but appears to still be same risk (extremely low) of serious cases. This won’t end until literally everyone eligible for the vaccine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t sign up for that. There are people who seem to want Covid to go on forever.

It’s empowering to them.

It is an endemic disease that is never going away. Why is it so hard for you to understand?

Surveillance testing keeps kids out of school and essentially closes schools to healthy kids. Test to stay keeps kids in school. It's not that hard to understand the difference.

If, as you say,it's never going away, will test to stay become permanent?

No, we need to treat it like everything other disease where you're actually sick if you have symptoms. Life is not about trying to avoid catching a cold.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Vaccines for < 12 available before year's end, it seems. That's when it ends, folks.

Not unless it covers 0-5 years. Everyone said it would end when adults (most high risk) would be vaccinated. More kids are getting COVID but appears to still be same risk (extremely low) of serious cases. This won’t end until literally everyone eligible for the vaccine.

Goal posts move again. And once we vaccinate 0-5 years, the goal posts will move again.

This just goes on and on until people say "enough" because even if we vaccinate 100% of people, there will still be cases. COVID is already endemic in our highly vaccinated population and will never be eradicated. This stuff stops when we say so.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also to emphasize a real life example from that article: “One private school in San Francisco with which we worked, and which gave us permission to share its experience — anonymously — has been open since October and has been testing all students and staff members monthly with saliva-based PCR tests; the school had performed more than 1,600 surveillance tests as of March 31. Only 10 came back positive, and eight were determined by clinical review and further testing to be false positives. Of the two true positive tests, one person had mild symptoms and another had a known exposure. In other words, the testing program did not identify any cases among teachers or students that would not have been picked up through ordinary symptom-based and contact-based screening.”

So show me where this surveillance testing has actually been proven effective in schools? Explain to me beyond the vagaries of that it “might prevent” spread why this is a good use of taxpayer funds, loss of learning time, etc?

Okay. How about this recent (8/1/2021) Lancet study on the cost savings achieved last year in at 93 K-12 schools and 18 universities throughout the country through a similar pooled surveillance program?

Surveillance testing was a factor in the early detection of asymptomatic infection and minimization of an outbreak risk. According to our data, a 0.3% positivity rate was observed after testing 253,406 samples. This amounts to 855 individuals identified early before a significant outbreak was observed. Although it would be difficult to estimate cost averted due to variability of positivity rate among asymptomatic populations, we estimated that these 855 individuals could potentially spread infection to 2.4 persons per day in a school setting [[22]]. In the absence of an early detection strategy (surveillance), this would lead to 2052 infected persons due to asymptomatic transmission. Out of these 2052 individuals, up to 25% (or 513 persons) may be symptomatic [[23]]. These persons would have required out-patient management at minimum, costing an average of $500–1000 for out-patient care, according to data released by Blue Cross Blue Shield [[24]]. Therefore, the costs averted for mild to moderate cases can be conservatively estimated to be between $256,500 and 513,000.

Furthermore, nearly 5% of symptomatic individuals (under 20 years old) have presented with severe to critical disease [[25],[26]], Thus nearly 26 individuals would have required hospitalization according to a FAIR Health Study, with the median cost of hospitalization ranging from a low of $34,662 for the 23–30 age group to a high of $45,683 for the 51–60 age group [[24]]. For those under 20 years of age, the average hospitalization cost was estimated at $68,261 and $77,323 for those over 60 years of age. Therefore, the cost averted for severe to critical cases was conservatively estimated to be $901,212 for our test population. These were the most conservative estimates of the cost averted by combining frequent surveillance testing (weekly) with prompt isolation/quarantine procedures in school and university setting. These estimates did not consider the worst-case scenario, where infection to older individuals within the school (teachers, principal) and outside of the school setting (parents, grandparents) would most likely have led to worse clinical outcome due to COVID-19.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00308-4/fulltext. The most conservative estimates to this study suggest that it ultimately prevented around 2052 additional people from becoming infected with Covid, and that this prevention saved well over $1million in medical costs, which may be a drastic underestimation as it does not consider potential effects from older individuals at the school or home (principals or grandparents) becoming infected and having worse clinical outcomes than those allowed for here. This cost analysis further makes no valuation of the monetary value of the continued health impairment caused caused by some Covid cases or the monetary value of the lives of any of the (again, conservatively estimated) 2,052 additional people who would have caught Covid from the 855 individuals identified early through this testing program. (But hey, to the anti-testers, that kind of preventable death is just what happens during an epidemic.)

The study appears to have been subsidized by a funding group so the cost of the testing itself is not given; however it is noted that it's the POOLING of the test results -- the thing that most parents who won't sign their kids up for it -- that makes the testing cheaper and cost effective to perform in bulk. In other words, the people who won't sign up their kids don't really want testing and will only sign up for it if it's the very expensive kind that will break the budget. Because again, they don't care about APS as a whole -- everything comes down to their own individual convenience. No surprise there.

This study was done BEFORE we had vaccinations and includes HS and college aged kids who are often in closer extracurricular contact than the younger kids. It also doesn’t distinguish between schools that are already masking and taking precautions like outdoor lunch. And I note that the positive percent at K-12 schools was .01% vs. the .05% of universities. There is no breakdown between the younger K-12 crowd vs. teenagers. It also doesn’t differentiate whether the estimated cost of prevented hospitalizations were for kids (who tend to have more mild symptoms) vs. 18+ year olds.

So no, this study from Jan. 2021 for K through university students engaging in unquantified COVID prevention measures does not convince me that my young elementary kid in a highly vaccinated community with masks and outdoor lunches needs to undergo surveillance screening. But go for it if you think this is relevant.